The Tribune

Sports are boring. Let’s talk about baseball – I don’t care if it is “America’s pastime,” but when a game only becomes exciting after two and a half hours and consists of waiting to find out whether a player will hit the ball – or if it’s really heated, whether a player will catch it – then I believe it’s time to find a better way to spend the afternoon.

Soccer, football, the beautiful game; whatever you want to call it, it’s a sport suffering from a debilitating illness. One symptom of this illness is players flying through the air whenever they are so much as grazed by an opposing player in a pathetic, yet all too often fruitful, attempt to draw the referee’s attention.

I hate this article. I hate the necessity of this debate. It disgusts me, as it disgusts many, that baseball has become a witch-hunt; a magnet for cynics. Baseball is a beautiful, unappreciated sport. It is exciting, deeply cerebral and rich with history.

Does anyone else hear that laughing? It’s coming from the south, somewhere below the 49th parallel. That sound is our American counterparts buckling over at our blind devotion to this pastime of ours-one which, yet again, has embarrassed us for taking it seriously.

In years past, Chicago has been called the most segregated city in America, in reference to the city’s heavily black South Side and the mostly white neighbourhoods of the North Side. The city’s most persistent divide, however, has little to do with race. To a much greater extent than either New York or Los Angeles, Chicago is a city divided by baseball.

It’s official. There will be no salary cap in the NFL next season. At first glance, it would appear that richer, more successful teams will start spending more money on the players they want to keep, and the league’s average salaries and team payrolls will undoubtedly rise.

With March Madness upon us, spectators sometimes forget that there will actually be two sports on display throughout the competition: basketball and cheerleading. NCAA cheerleaders, unlike their compatriots in the NFL and the NBA, deserve that name. Professional sports “cheerleading” would in reality be more properly referred to as dancing, since these teams’ performances are more akin to what you might see on a Saturday night at a gentleman’s club than what goes on at cheerleading national championships.

The gold medal is back in its rightful place, safe for another four years. Canada fulfilled its destiny, and another chapter has been added to the legend of Sidney Crosby. But as the last of the champagne is poured and celebrations across the country begin to die down, it’s already time to think ahead, and consider the troubling future of Olympic men’s hockey.

There are a number of words and phrases that we can use to describe the embarrassment that was the NBA Dunk Contest on Saturday night: worst of all time; forgettable; pathetic; mind-bogglingly bad. With a lineup featuring zero legitimate stars, and two players averaging less than 22 minutes per game, the event that many suspected was on wobbly legs finally came crashing down.

Things are not going well in Minnesota. Three summers ago, Minnesotans watched as their once-beloved Kevin Garnett celebrated his first NBA title as a member of the Boston Celtics. Two weeks ago, they watched in horror as Brett Favre threw an interception late in the fourth to halt the Vikings’ march to their first Super Bowl since 1976.